Street Gang (17 page)

It was a good question.

“A girl to work out front,” Tillstrom said. “Somebody who could interview guest stars, sing a song now and then. I guess what I really need is a girl who can talk to a dragon.” Tillstrom remembered a sweet, sunny vocalist and quick-study comedienne who, months before, had passed an informal audition with him.

“Say,” said Tillstrom to Eddy, “do you know how I can get in touch with Fran Allison?”
⁶

Tillstrom surmised that dragon charmer might be a perfect role for her; she’d already done something similar once for Tillstrom while chatting between performances at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Both were there to entertain wounded servicemen, and when Allison had looked directly into Ollie’s soulful sewn-on eyes, she began conversing with the dragon as if it were a sentient being instead of a shirtsleeve extension. It made a lasting impression on Tillstrom, who never, ever referred to his creations as puppets. The Kuklapolitans were “kids” who were born in his home workshop; bachelor Burr was their benefactor and benevolent guardian. In time, Allison would buy in completely to the conceit that Kukla and Ollie were “real,” sock puppets with souls. “Fran always believed,” said Tillstrom.
⁷

 

Allison was a small-town Iowan with bales and bales of gumption. After graduation from tiny Coe College, she had taught grade-schoolers in the small Iowa towns of Schleswig and Pocahontas. Upon being notified that after four years her hundred-dollar-a-month salary would be increased by only two dollars, she quit teaching to pursue theater. After spotting an advertisement in a Kansas City newspaper for a “wonderful opportunity” awaiting young dramatists, she withdrew fifty dollars from her savings to enroll in a two-week course in play producing.
⁸
But after a cruel month on the road with a money-losing show, she trudged back home to La Porte City, Iowa, with fifty cents in her pocket.

Still determined to make a go of show business, she sang on local radio shows in Cedar Rapids, Ottumwa, and Waterloo, where one afternoon in 1934 at station WMT, she was startled by Joe DuMond, host of the
Cornhuskers
program. Vamping to fill the final three minutes of the show, DuMond stuck a live microphone in front of Allison. “Well, well, folks,” he said. “Guess who just dropped in—Aunt Fanny! Come on up here and tell us what’s new.” Summoning the voice of a spinster who blabbed small-town secrets, Allison ad libbed fluidly and flawlessly. “Well, Mr. DuMond,” she said. “I dropped by to see Daisy Dosselhurst yesterday and her Junior came to the door. I said real nice, ‘Junior, is your mother home?’ ‘No, she ain’t,’ he said. ‘Is your father home?’ I asked. ‘No, he ain’t,’ he said. Well, I heard just about enough ain’ts, so I said, ‘Where’s your grammar?’ He answered quick, ‘She ain’t here, either.’ ” The impromptu dish of cornpone earned Allison a sponsor (a manufacturer of heavy farm equipment) and a daily comedy spot on WMT.

Impressed with her improvisational comedy, the station manager in Waterloo sent a transcription of an Aunt Fanny routine to Don McNeill, host and toastmaster of
The Breakfast Club
, a daily entertainment hour from Chicago that was quickly becoming a network radio institution for Depression-era listeners. McNeill’s upbeat mix of popular music and mild mayhem provided an antidote to the despair of morning newscasts. Allison not only successfully relocated Aunt Fanny to Chicago, she also was chosen as a featured
Breakfast Club
vocalist.
Collier’s
noted that “between programs, Fran carried on a rushing business in singing commercials, partly because she could sing in one key and whistle in another, a rare talent which permitted the perpetrators of the commercials to work out a variety of special effects without doubling the payroll.”
⁹

 

Tillstrom asked Allison to meet him at a coffee shop to discuss his ideas for
Junior Jamboree
, the new TV show featuring his puppet troupe. As the leggy models at the World’s Fair had, Allison would face the camera and freely mix with the puppets. The entire show would hinge on their ad libs; there would be no scripts to memorize and no rehearsal. Before airtime, they would agree to a list of possible topics. Their byplay would be conversational, like neighbors yakking over a fence, and he urged her to summon an air that would be as close to her authentic personality as the situations would allow. This idiosyncratic informality would become a hallmark of the so-called Chicago school of television, the graduates of which included Dave Garroway (
Garroway at Large
) and Studs Terkel (
Studs’ Place
).

Junior Jamboree
launched October 14, 1947. On October 22,
Variety
cast a cynical eye on the show:

 

Renamed
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
when it was aired nationally on NBC in 1949, the show prompted passersby to press their noses against appliance store windows. By 1950, the cyclonic force of the show’s popularity prompted toy makers to approach Tillstrom, but the idea of assembly-line replicas of his darlings was anathema to him. “I respected him so much for having turned down a fortune,” Allison recalled.
¹⁰

Jon Stone described his time on the
CBS Children’s Film Festival
with Tillstrom as “another step in my puppetry education,” providing insights that would later inform the Muppets of
Sesame Street
.

“Gus Allegretti [on
Captain Kangaroo
] had given me the introductory course, and, once again, I was in the presence of greatness,” Stone said. “Burr was a near genius. The magic that Kukla and Ollie exuded was beyond reason or explanation. It certainly wasn’t in the puppets themselves. My kids made better papier-mâché puppets in the third grade. And the magic did not come from the manipulation. Ollie’s mouth opened and closed in the most remote relationship to the dialogue he was supposed to be spouting, and with every syllable there was the most disconcerting
clack
whenever the mouth clamp closed. Kukla had no mouth movement at all. What then made these two characters so believable was Burr. He breathed life and humor and depth into his little pals by giving them character. From Burr I learned that the success of the character comes a hundred percent from the puppeteer underneath, not from any externals or cosmetics or tricky gadgetry.”

Despite positive reviews and decent ratings, Stone and Whedon were replaced after the film festival’s first season. “Fred Silverman’s volatility and snap judgments were already legend among colleagues,” Stone said. “My association with him taught me other valuable lessons about the television business. [Though] we had set the tone and format of the program and devised an economical and efficient method of operation, the suits apparently had decided that they could find someone cheaper who could carry on our work. We spoke bitterly of our disappointment to Burr, who reassured us that we were his boys, and if we weren’t coming back for season two, neither would Kukla, Fran and Ollie. One for all and all for one! But when season two rolled around, Burr was back, and Tom and I were history.”

Not long afterward, however, Silverman was back on the phone with Stone and Whedon’s agent, dangling a chance to develop a series. After a preliminary meeting at his office to discuss the project, a series built around a classic, albeit well-worn, fairy-tale heroine, Silverman invited Stone and Whedon back to meet one of the creative partners he had in mind for it. “Friday morning we are going to meet with Christ and his dog,” he said.

Lean, bearded Jim Henson, whose dog puppet Rowlf had been riffing with that smoothie Jimmy Dean on his popular prime-time show on ABC, listened to the pitch Stone and Whedon had prepared that involved an actress as Snow White who would be surrounded by woodland puppets. “Jim nodded characteristically and
hmmmmmed
as we talked, then gently began to explain to us why realistic animal puppets are not nearly as easy or effective as more abstract puppets. Tom and I glanced at each other. ‘He doesn’t like it,’ we thought. ‘We’ve lost him.’ And then, softly, suddenly Jim said he liked the idea. Count him in.”

“No sooner had Jim nodded than the door bust open and an army of suits filled the room,” Stone said. Among them were Bernie Brillstein, Henson’s agent, and Al Gottesman, the puppeteer’s business manager. “All were suddenly at the table, machine-gunning demands of a hundred percent of merchandising, percentage of gross revenues, percentages of ownership, residual control, and a hundred other demands. Tom and I watched in amazement. It was my first experience doing business with Jim but far from the last. Over the years, Jim became a close personal friend and we developed a strong mutual professional respect, but none of that ever got in the way of The Deal. Jim was a killer businessman.”

The explanation for Silverman’s sudden interest in commissioning a pilot script for Snow White turned out to be show business as usual. Bob Keeshan’s contract was up for renewal at CBS, and Captain Kangaroo himself had been making noises about leaping to a competing network. Development on Snow White screeched to a halt once CBS signed a new deal with Keeshan, and Silverman agreed to allow Stone and Whedon’s new representative from General Artists Corporation to shop their script elsewhere.
¹¹
“CBS could have cared less now what happened to Snow White. As soon as we secured the rights, we took the idea to ABC. Jim was still willing to participate and the idea was still sound.” An ABC programming chief gave approval for a pilot, with one catch: lose Snow White. “Since it had been CBS’s idea to center the story on Snow White, that somehow tarnished the whole concept in the eyes of ABC,” Stone said. The network demanded that the lead character come from a different fairy tale. “Tom and I couldn’t figure out how the audience in television land would associate Snow White with CBS, but by then we knew better than to try to apply logic when dealing with network suits. Cinderella it was.”

Songs for the
Cinderella
pilot were composed by Joe Raposo, that lounge pianist who provided the entr’acte music for the production Stone directed on Cape Cod back in 1955. “We had stayed friends when we moved to New York City,” Stone said, “but the
Cinderella
pilot brought us together professionally for the first time.” It also marked the first collaboration between
Sesame Street
patriarchs Henson and Raposo. When one considers that the Muppet performers in the project included Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson, who would later give life to the Count, Herry Monster, and Sherlock Hemlock,
Cinderella
was almost a dress rehearsal for
Sesame Street.

On the final night of taping, a rollicking wrap party also served as a send-off for Oz, who had received his army induction notice. He was due to take his preinduction physical the next morning, and the unspoken concern was that he would be shipped off to Vietnam, like so many men his age. “We all gave him presents and hugs and all the support we could,” Stone said. “We partied until the wee hours, and at 6:00 a.m. Frank was to board the military bus to Fort Dix to face his uncertain future.”

Oz failed the physical and was reclassified 4-F. He would get no closer to Saigon than Syossett, Long Island.

 

Everything was progressing splendidly for a fall launch for
Cinderella
on ABC’s Saturday schedule when the project was once again denied a happy ending. Roone Arledge, ABC’s visionary programming executive for sports, landed a college football Game of the Week package for the network that forced an entire revamping of the late-morning and early-afternoon schedule.

Soon after, Henson approached Stone and Whedon with a plan to expand the pilot into an hour special. Retitled
Hey, Cinderella
, the project was mounted in Canada with the original creative team. Henson served as both producer and director.

When it was finally aired in the United States in 1970, the result was less than the sum of its parts. Though abundant talent was involved, the final edit of
Hey, Cinderella
was bloated, draggy, and all but bereft of laughs. Even Kermit seemed bored by it, and he served as a kind of sardonic Muppet-master of ceremonies.

We’ll never know if the half-hour series would have soared, but the hour special sank under its own weight.

 

In the spring of 1964, a somewhat reluctant Beverley Owen was cast in an oddball pilot for CBS that turned into a monster hit. When
The Munsters
debuted in September of that year, she played the quite normal niece in a household that otherwise included not only the bride of Frankenstein (Lily), but her groom (Herman), her son (Eddie), and a grandpa. Marilyn, a manhunter in the classic coed sense, attended Westbury College. Whenever she would bring a suitor home to 1313 Mockingbird Lane, he would run screaming into the night after meeting the family.

The series was shot in Los Angeles, necessitating long stays out West for Owen, who was under contract to Universal. The absences caused a strain on her relationship with Stone, who had spoken of commitment but had yet to produce an engagement ring. “It was decision time,” Stone said, “and we decided that we both wanted to change the bicoastal relationship.”